The XenServer team is proud to announce the release of version 7.2, which includes an array of improvements that further simplify and refine the user experience and enable even greater platform management scalability.

Click here to learn more about the new features available in XenServer 7.2.

A hotfix (XS71E001) has been released for customers using XenCenter as the management console for their XenServer 7.1 virtual environments.

This hotfix offers improvements in XenCenter UI responsiveness, as well as several fixes associated with host health check analysis, status reports and updates. Additional information pertaining to this hotfix can be found here.

As always, we encourage customers read the hotfix release notes and install the hotfix to avoid any of the issues described in the notes.

Hear ye, hear ye… we are pleased to announce that an alpha release of XenServer Project Ely is now available for download! After Dundee (7.0), we've come a little closer to Cambridge (the birthplace of Xen) for our codename, as the city of Ely is just up the road.

Since releasing version 7.0 in May, the XenServer engineering team has been working fervently to prepare the platform with the latest innovations in server virtualization technology. As a precursor, a pre-release containing the prerequisites for enabling a number of powerful (and really cool!) new features has been made available for download from the pre-release page.

What's In it?

The following is a brief description of some of the feature-prerequisites included in this pre-release:

Xen 4.7: This release of Xen adds support for "live-patching" of the Xen hypervisor, allowing issues to be patched without requiring a host reboot. In this alpha release there is no functionality for you to test in this area, but we thought it was worth telling you about none the less. Xen 4.7 also includes various performance improvements, and updates to the virtual machine introspection code (surfaced in XenServer as Direct Inspect).

Kernel 4.4: Updated kernel to support future feature considerations. All device drivers will be at the upstream versions; we'll be updating these with drops direct from the hardware vendors as we go through the development cycle.

VM import/export performance: a longstanding request from our user community, we've worked to improve the import/export speeds of VMs, and Ely alpha 1 now averages 2x faster than the previous version.

What We'd Like Help With

The purpose of this alpha release is really to make sure that a variety of hardware works with project Ely. Because we've updated core platform components (Xen and the Dom0 kernel), it's always important to check on hardware that we don’t have in our QA labs that all is well. Thus, the more people who can download this build, install, and run a couple of VMs to check all is well the better.

Additionally, we've been working with the community (over on XSO-445) on improving VM import/export performance: we'd like to see whether the improvements we've seen in our tests are what you see too. If they're not, we can figure out why and fix it :-).

Upgrading

This is pre-release software, not for production use. Upgrades from XenServer 7.0 should work fine, but it goes without saying that you should ensure you back up any critical data.

Reporting Bugs

We encourage visitors to download the pre-release and provide us with your feedback. If you do find a problem, please head over to the bug tracker and file a ticket. Please be sure to include a server status report!

Now that we've moved up to a new pre-release project, it's time to remove the XS 6.5 SP1 fix version from the bug tracker, in order that we keep it tidy. You'll see an "Ely alpha" affects version is now present instead.

Introduction

As XenServer Administrators already know (or will know), there is one user "to rule them all"... and that user is root. Be it an SSH connection or command-line interaction with DOM0 via XenCenter, while you may be typing commands in RING3 (user space), you are doing it as the root user.

This is quite appropriate for XenServer's architecture as once the bare-metal is powered on, one is not booting into the the latest "re-spin" of some well-known (or completely obscure) Linux-spin. Quite the opposite. One is actually booting into the virtualization layer: dom0 or the Control Domain. This is where separation of Guest VMs (domUs) and user space programmes (ping, fsck, and even XE) begins... even at the command line for root.

In summary, it is not uncommon for many Administrators to require root access to a XenServer... at one time. Thus, this article will show my own means of adding granularity to the HISTORY command as well as logging (via Syslog) of each and every root user session.

Assumptions

As BASH is the default shell, this article assumes that one has knowledge of BASH, things "BASH", Linux-based utilities, and so forth. If one isn't familiar with BASH, how BASH leverages global and local scripts to setup a user environment, etc I have provided the following resources:

Purpose

The purpose I wanted to achieve was not just a more 'clean way' to look at the history command, but to also log the root user's session information: recording their access means, what command they ran, and WHEN.

In short, we go from this:

To this (plus record of each command in /var/log/user.log | /var/log/messages):

What To Do?

First, we want to backup /etc/bashrc to /etc/backup.bashrc in the event one would like to revert to the original HISTORY method, etc. This can be done via the command-line of the XenServer:

cp /etc/bashrc /etc/backup.bashrc

Secondly, the following addition will should be added to the end of /etc/bashrc:

##[ HISTORY LOGGING ]######################################################### ADD USER LOGGING AND HISTORY COMMAND CONTEXT FOR SOME AUDITING# DEC 2014, JK BENEDICT# This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | @xenfomation##########################################################################

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Jose ChanHead of IT DepartmentMacau Polytechnic Institute

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